Moscow vaccination centres open tomorrow

Moscow will open its new Covid-19 vaccination centres tomorrow and the first people to receive the shot will be teachers, doctors and social workers, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said yesterday.

President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday ordered a large-scale voluntary vaccination programme against Covid-19 to begin next week across Russia, saying teachers and doctors should be first in line to get the flagship Sputnik V vaccine.

People in Moscow will be able to register for the jab online from today, Sobyanin said in a statement on his website.

Russia, which has resisted imposing stringent lockdown measures, reported a record 28,145 new infections earlier yesterday, including 7,750 in Moscow.

The virus has killed at least 1,495,205 people worldwide since the outbreak emerged in China last December, according to a tally from official sources compiled by AFP yesterday.

The United States is the worst-affected country with 273,847 deaths from 13,925,350 cases.

US deaths from the pandemic have surged past 2,000 for two days in a row as the most dangerous season of the year approached, taxing an overwhelmed healthcare system with US political leadership in disarray.

The toll from Covid-19 reached its second-highest level ever on Wednesday with 2,811 lives lost, according to a Reuters tally of official data, one short of the record from April 15.

Nearly 200,000 new US cases were reported on Wednesday, with record hospitalisations approaching 100,000 patients.

The sobering data came as the head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday warned that December, January and February were likely to be "the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation."

CDC Director Dr Robert Redfield told an event hosted by the US Chamber of Commerce that the United States could start losing around 3,000 people - roughly the number that died in the attacks of September 11, 2001 - each day over the next two months.

"The mortality concerns are real and I do think unfortunately before we see February, we could be close to 450,000 Americans that have died from this virus," Redfield said.

US hopes to have immunised 100 million people by the end of February, with priority given to the elderly, health care workers, and first responders.

In Iran, coronavirus infections surpassed one million cases yesterday, as the authorities consider easing restrictions in many parts of the Middle East's hardest hit country.

The Islamic republic has recorded 1,003,494 infections since announcing its first cases in February, ministry spokeswoman Sima Sadat Lari said on state television.

The coronavirus has killed 49,348 people in Iran over the same period of time, according to official figures.

IBM WARNS

IBM is sounding the alarm over hackers targeting companies critical to the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, a sign that digital spies are turning their attention to the complex logistical work involved in inoculating the world's population against the novel coronavirus.

The information technology company said in a blog post published yesterday that it had uncovered "a global phishing campaign" focused on organizations associated with the Covid-19 vaccine "cold chain" - the process needed to keep vaccine doses at extremely cold temperatures as they travel from manufacturers to people's arms.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency reposted the report, warning members of Operation Warp Speed - the US government's national vaccine mission - to be on the lookout.

Facebook Inc yesterday said it would remove false claims about Covid-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts, following a similar announcement by Alphabet Inc's YouTube in October.

The move expands Facebook's current rules against falsehoods and conspiracy theories about the pandemic.

The social media company says it takes down coronavirus misinformation that poses a risk of "imminent" harm, while labeling and reducing distribution of other false claims that fail to reach that threshold.

World Health Organization European director Hans Kluge said yesterday the promise of Covid-19 vaccines is "phenomenal" and "potentially game-changing".

Britain approved Pfizer Inc's Covid-19 vaccine, developed with Germany's BioNTech, outpacing the world in the race to begin the most crucial mass inoculation programme in history.

Speaking from Copenhagen, Kluge said vaccine supplies would be very limited at first and that countries must decide who gets priority, though the WHO also cited "growing consensus" that first recipients should be older people, medical workers and people with other diseases, as Britain plans.

The coronavirus still had the potential to do "enormous damage", Kluge said, but "the future looks brighter" as other vaccine candidates, including from Moderna and AstraZeneca, have also delivered positive trial results.

"The more candidates we have, the more opportunities for success," Kluge told a news briefing. "Vaccines, combined with other public health measures, bring the end of an acute phase of the pandemic and the rebuilding of economies within reach."